


Mac + Alkali + Eyes

by Emachinescat



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Aftercare, Alkali, Angst, Bromance, Caretaker Jack, Drain Cleaner in Eyes, Epic Bromance, Eye Injury, Eye Trauma, FebuWhump2021, Febuwhumpday18, Friendship, Gen, Graphic Descriptions of Chemical Burns to the Eyes, Hospitalization, Hurt Angus Macgyver (Macgyver 2016), Hurt/Comfort, I can't see, Jack Gives Mac Medical Treatment, Jack Takes Care of Mac, Mac Whump, Missions Gone Wrong, Panic Attacks, Temporary Blindness, Whump, chemical burns, fluff at the end, jack feeling guilty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 14:35:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29543856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emachinescat/pseuds/Emachinescat
Summary: Mac is used to being the one who uses random chemicals to his advantage, but that changes when a fleeing target throws a bucket of drain cleaner in MacGyver’s face – right into his unprotected eyes.  Or, in which Jack has to hurt MacGyver in order to help him.  Written for Febuwhump on Tumblr. Day 18 - “I can’t see”
Comments: 6
Kudos: 49
Collections: Febuwhump 2021 - Emachinescat, febuwhump 2021





	Mac + Alkali + Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, a lot of research went into this fic (I saw some things I will never be able to un-see), but I'm decidedly not a doctor, so bear with me! Here we are with another Mac and Jack centered story – I hope you enjoy! :)

MacGyver was used to being the one who used his surroundings to his advantage. Most of the people he went up against – terrorists, traitors, hitmen, dealers – were fairly traditional with their weapons and combat. Mac was used to being shot at, beaten to hell, and nearly blown up. What he _wasn't_ used to was bad guys abandoning their trusty firearms for a bucket of drain cleaner left over from Mac's most recent improvisation. That's not to say that this particular weapons dealer was _creative_ about his approach – but the sad truth was that alkali was just as effective when thrown into someone's eyes as it was in an impromptu fog machine.

Mac didn't have enough time to close his eyes all the way. He saw what was going to happen the second before the chemical splashed into his face, and then he didn't see _anything_.

Pain exploded behind his squeezed-shut eyelids, radiating from the point of contact like RF waves from a cell tower. He stumbled to his knees, skidding hard on the concrete floor of the abandoned auto shop turned weapons-stash, his fingers instinctively reaching up, clawing for his eyes, desperate, panicked, needing to do something to stop the burning, to ease the howling agony searing his eyes. He managed to keep himself from touching the eyelids, if only just. Even with his eyes on fire, he still knew that touching would only make things worse. He also knew how to treat severe chemical burns to his eyes, and step one was actually keeping his eyelids peeled open – squeezing them shut would only increase the damage.

The racing footsteps of the bad guy had disappeared into the distance the second that Mac had gone down. He supposed he should count himself lucky that the guy didn't stick around to finish him off, though it was hard to feel lucky when his eyes felt like they were dissolving in pools of acid. Nausea rolled Mac's stomach, and he nearly vomited. He was now listening for another pair of footsteps, coming from somewhere behind. _Where the hell is Jack?_

Well, in the meantime, Mac thought frantically, feeling the tears streaming down from his damaged eyes, he could stop putting off the inevitable and do what he needed to do. Mac didn't normally procrastinate, even when the thing he didn't want to do was going to hurt. But now, the thought of trying to open his eyes, which were already twin pools of lava eating through his head, almost made him wish that his attacker had used his gun instead. Mac took a deep breath – he felt its tremble to his very core – and wrenched his eyelids open with a yell of defiance.

And immediately slammed them back down, a rough sob exploding from his chest in anguish. Open air on his eye felt like he was being doused all over again, like someone had jabbed red-hot pokers into his eye sockets and was twisting them around for good measure.

He didn't hear Jack's feet slapping against the pavement over his own cries, but he did feel the strong, safe hand fall on his shoulder, felt himself being turned around, heard Jack's frantic voice demanding to know what had happened, what was wrong. Trying his best to regain control of himself now that Jack was here – Jack fixed things, it's what he did, it would be okay – Mac managed to choke out three of the most terrifying words he'd ever uttered:

"I can't see."

* * *

Jack Dalton couldn't remember the last time that he had been so terrified.

He didn't know what he had been expecting when ran up to see the dealer gone and Mac hunched on the ground – all Jack could see was a head of disheveled blonde hair and Mac's back, shoulder muscles bunched together like a snake coiling up on itself. Fear thudded through him in time with his heart as he approached, thinking maybe the kid had been shot or stabbed or something.

He didn't expect to see Mac's face a grotesque shade of red, skin patchy and raw, studded with tear tracks. But the worst of it was Mac's eyes. Jack felt sick at the sight. Mac's eyes were shut tight, the lids swollen and puffy, an electric red like the skin had been peeled off, revealing the gooey bits underneath. And his kid's body quivered with uncontrollable sobs that he tried desperately to contain, and Jack's heart shriveled up and died at the sound.

"Mac – Mac, hey, buddy, I need you to focus. I need you to talk to me, okay?" Jack had no idea how he managed to keep his voice mostly calm, how he kept the raging panic from consuming every word. His own hands were shaking as he tried to calm Mac down, to get his attention so he could figure out what the hell had happened to his boy.

A great sniffle – Jack couldn't stand to think about how much pain Mac had to be in if he was so openly showing his pain. Mac didn't cry, certainly not from injury. His primary objective when sick or hurt was to downplay the ailment as much as possible. He didn't show pain, not to this degree. Not like this. And the fact that he was now scared the shit of Jack.

Mac's voice shook as he answered, but he managed to supply his overwatch with a semi-coherent answer: The fleeing bad guy had sloshed a bucket of drain cleaner into his eyes. Jack's heart nearly gave out then. He didn't know all the sciencey details or the chemical makeup of drain cleaner, but he knew enough to understand that this was bad.

He barely managed to temper his own panic – his desire to keep Mac calm and get him the help that he needed was the only thing that kept his emotions in check – as he asked, "Okay, what do I do? How do I help?"

Mac's answer was breathless, his chest hitching as he made a valiant effort to regain control over his body's reaction to his pain. "Uh… f-first. Call ambulance." Jack did, keeping one hand on his kid's shoulder in an attempt to ground him, to remind him that he wasn't alone in his suffering. Once a Phoenix bus was on its way, he asked, "What next? How do we treat it until it gets here?" He thought back to his high school chemistry days (they seemed farther away than he liked to admit), and recalled a sign on the cinderblock wall about safety goggles and eye-flushing. "Gotta flush those suckers out, right?"

Mac nodded. With difficulty, he directed, "There's a hose … around back. Get m-me there, and we–" he broke off with a huff of agony, but he didn't need to finish: Jack was already hauling his partner to his feet. Mac was nearly dead weight, all his focus and energy sapped by his burned eyes.

"I can't see," he reminded Jack, though his overwatch was well aware.

"Don't worry, brother. I gotcha. Just one foot in front of the other. That's it. Careful there – slight step down. Here we go… All right, let's ease ya down." Gently, Jack lowered Mac to the ground. "What's the best way to do this?" he asked, standing up to grab the hose and twisting the tap. For a horrible moment, nothing happened, then a great gurgling erupted from within the wall, and the hose stiffened, came to life like an industrial green snake. It was the kind that had a nozzle with several settings, but all of them were too strong for his purposes, so he removed the nozzle all together, and a stream of water gushed forth at a much more reasonable rate.

"Um…" Mac's fingers were clenching and unclenching, raised up to his chest, like he was having to actively restrain himself from reaching up and touching his swollen eyes. "I should lie down, I think."

So Jack helped him lie back, stripping off his own jacket to slip under Mac's head. The kid lay there, muscles taut, body so tense Mac could've been spring loaded. Jack sat down on the ground next to him, hose within reach.

"All right. Let's wash out those baby blues. Can you open your eyes for me, Mac?"

To his credit, the kid tried. Like everything else he did, Mac put every ounce of heart and effort into prying his puffy eyelids open. Jack caught the tiniest slit of glazed blue set against fiery red before Mac's eyes clamped closed again. Fresh tears, from pain or from the chemicals, leaked down the angry, reddened cheeks. The shame in Mac's voice hurt Jack almost as much as the sight of his partner in this much pain.

"I can't."

Jack closed his own eyes for the briefest of moments, steeling himself for what he was about to have to do. The thought of inflicting more pain on Mac cut him to the very center of his being, but he knew that they'd already waited too long to start flushing the burns. They couldn't delay any longer, certainly not until the ambulance arrived.

"Okay," Jack said, and he did his best to sound like he was in control of his own emotions, which he most certainly was not. "I'm going to have to hold them open."

Mac nodded, and Jack could tell by the way his jaw clenched that he was scared. Jack moved quickly, well aware that if he didn't throw himself into his task that he would lose the courage and resolve to do what needed to be done. As gently as he could, Jack placed the palm of one hand on Mac's burned forehead, and used his index and middle fingers to carefully pry Mac's eyes open.

Mac hissed, his hands flying up instinctively to pull Jack away. "Hey, hey, hey," Jack soothed, and he used his other hand to swat Mac's hands back down. "I think it might be best if you sit on them, hoss."

Mac levered his torso off the ground and wedged his hands behind his back, lowering his full weight onto them. "Attaboy." Jack forced Mac's eyelids up a bit more – the skin was hot to the touch, an iridescent shade of red, and incredibly swollen. What lay underneath was far worse. Mac's irises, normally a vibrant cobalt, were dulled, almost filmy, and the whites of his eyes no longer existed - to Jack, stomach twisting uncomfortably, it looked as if the whites of Mac's eyes had been peeled. Every inch of surface area had turned bright red. He looked like he was trying out for the part of Lord Voldemort.

As more of his eyes were exposed to the open air, a choked gurgling sound forced its way up Mac's throat, and Jack thought for a terrible moment that he was going to be sick. But instead, Mac just writhed, his legs kicking out helplessly against the pain, arm muscles bulging from the strain of trying to keep his hands beneath him.

Jack himself could barely see at this point through the tears in his own eyes. He brushed them away, touched his free hand briefly in a fleeting moment of comfort against Mac's cheek, then got to work. He picked up the hose, which had been spewing water the whole time Jack had been prepping Mac, and had created a cool puddle beneath them. Jack had barely realized that he was ass-deep in water. He figured Mac hadn't noticed at all.

Carefully, Jack placed his thumb in the middle of the stream of water, separating it into two smaller streams, which he directed as gingerly as possible into Mac's eyes. When the water hit, Mac howled, unable to contain himself and he thrashed on the ground, nearly dislodging Jack's grip.

"Hey, now, brother," Jack muttered, his own voice thick with emotion. He did the only thing he could think of – he swivelled his legs around on top of Mac's torso and applied pressure, holding the kid down. He heard Mac's breath hitch in panic, knew that he was probably miles away now, unaware of who was holding him down, pouring water onto his face. He was in agony, restrained, and on the receiving end of a faceful of cold water. In their line of work, those three things combined usually only meant one thing: waterboarding. Mac had only been waterboarded once, by a terror cell in Libya a couple of years ago, but that kind of thing was something you just didn't get over. You _never_ truly got over torture of that nature.

Jack was crying now, but he continued to flush out Mac's eyes, murmuring a string of mostly senseless reassurances, trying to remind himself that what he was doing was ultimately helping Mac, but he hated himself more with each second that passed. Finally, after about five minutes, Mac began to calm, and Jack hoped that the water had begun to sooth. But no – all of the tension suddenly drained from MacGyver's body at once, and he went limp.

He'd passed out. Thank _God_ , he'd passed out.

Two minutes later, the Phoenix ambulance screamed into the lot. Mac was placed on a stretcher, and Jack climbed up in the back of the bus with him. He stayed out of the way, watching the medics work, using clamps to keep Mac's eyes open and applying a constant, steady stream of saline. While one medic did this, another began to wash the chemical burns on Mac's cheeks, forehead, and nose.

The entire ride back to Phoenix, Jack alternated between watching his kid and glaring at his hands. He despised his hands for what they'd done to Mac, what they'd put him through.

Who was he kidding? His hands were just the tools he'd used to torture his best friend.

What Jack truly despised was himself.

* * *

When Mac awoke, it was to a blurry hospital room – probably Phoenix, if he had to guess – comprised of vague approximations of shapes and colors. His eyes felt like they'd been pulsed in a blender – raw and painful and cut to shreds. He closed them, but that didn't take away the discomfort. It took him a moment to remember what had led him here in the first place, but when everything came back to him, his eyes snapped open with panic, and his upper body surged up in bed.

Immediately, a strong hand was on his chest and though Mac could only see a fuzzy caricature of its owner, he knew without doubt it was Jack.

"Hey, Mac, you're all right," Jack said, and it sounded to Mac like his partner was trying to calm a crying child or a lost pet.

Mac allowed himself to be eased back onto his pillow, but the fear running through him was like live wires. "Jack," he rasped. His throat burned, and he didn't know if it was because of the screaming, or if he'd gotten a little of the drain cleaner in his mouth. He prayed it was the former. "I can't see!"

Jack's voice had a restrained quality to it when he spoke, like he was just keeping himself from falling off of a very steep ledge, and Mac heard the squeak of a chair, saw the blurred figure that had been looming over him lower itself down. "What do you mean, you can't see?" Each word was carefully measured. Jack was trying not to panic himself, which only made Mac panic more.

"The whole world is just colors and shapes, Jack! I can't make out _anything_ clearly."

To his surprise, a relieved laugh exploded from Jack's direction. The hand was back, this time squeezing his shoulder. "Doc said that's normal, Mac. Said your vision should come back in time, if you weren't completely blind – thank God you're not! From her examination, she said that we treated it in time to avoid major scarring or reformation."

Mac, heart slowing down to a more normal rhythm, relief cascading over him like a summer rain, barely caught Jack's mispronunciation. Almost. "Do you mean perforation?" Half the time, Mac couldn't tell if Jack messed up words on purpose just to get a rise out of him, or if he really did get words mixed up on the regular. Either way, it had become a part of their natural rhythm, one of the little quirks of their relationship, and after all he'd been through, correcting Jack felt a little bit like coming home.

Mac allowed his body to relax into the bed a little more and did a quick self-assessment. He came to the conclusion that he wasn't in nearly as much pain as he should have been. "Am I on drugs?" he asked, only now realizing that his head felt floaty, his limbs like noodles.

"Oh, yeah. You were given a shot of morphine, but they're gonna switch you to hydros now that you're awake. And you're on a strong antibiotic to fight off infection, _and_ Doc poured about an ocean's worth of eye drops in your eyeballs."

Mac allowed his eyelids to drop; his eyes still felt swollen, and the burning had increased, though that could have just been exhaustion, the pull of the drugs.

"Hey, man, I know you need to sleep, but can I say somethin' real quick?"

Mac opened his eyes again, concern rising in him at the seriousness in Jack's voice. "What's up?"

A pregnant pause. Then, Jack Normally-So-Good-At-Speaking-His-Mind Dalton stuttered out, "I… I – well, shit, man. I'm so sorry."

Mac blinked, then wished he hadn't, because it felt like he'd just given his eyes a good scrub with sandpaper. "Sorry? What for?"

"For what I put you through. Hell, kid, I might as well have been torturing you."

Ah. So Jack was feeling guilty about the lengths he'd had to go to to treat Mac's eyes. If Mac hadn't been on drugs, he probably would have predicted this sooner.

Mac fought through the tiredness that seemed to drag his body downwards into the surprisingly comfortable hospital bed and looked Jack in the eye, or at least where he guessed Jack's eyes would be. "You did what you had to, Jack, and it is _nothing_ to feel guilty about."

"Mac, if you'd'a heard you…"

"I was there, Jack. I had a front-row seat, remember? I was out of my head with pain anyway. When you started flushing the burns, I think I detached from reality completely. Went back… remembered – things." He shook himself mentally, then pressed on, his voice as strong as he could make it, imploring, desperate for Jack to understand. "But _none_ of that is your fault. None of that is your doing. You almost certainly saved my vision." It hit him then, the realization that if it hadn't been for Jack's treatment, he would have been helpless to perform first aid on himself. It hadn't been for Jack's strength and resolve, his ability to inflict pain on his partner and closest friend in order to treat his wounds, Mac would be _blind_ right now. Most likely forever.

Mac's next words shook with emotion. "It's because of you that I can see, Jack. You have a strength I can't even pretend to understand. You shouldn't be apologizing to me! I should be _thanking_ you." A pause. "So thank you for what you did, Jack. Thank you _so much_."

A tear burned down his face. He blamed it on the trauma, on the drugs. He reached out his hand in Jack's direction, and immediately, that warm, familiar grip wrapped itself around it. "I'd do anything for you," Jack said gruffly.

"I know, big guy. Thank you."

Jack's hand squeezed his own. "Get some sleep kid. I'll be here when you wake up."

Mac squeezed back, then let his eyes slip closed.

Jack didn't let go of his hand, and when Mac did wake up to clearer vision and a lighter heart, Jack was the first person that he saw. Just as he'd promised, Jack hadn't left his side.

But then again, Jack never did.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed – I'd love to hear your thoughts! :)
> 
> ~Emachinescat ^..^


End file.
